Steveston honours its fishing past

Steveston honours its fishing past

Little more than a century ago, Steveston was the salmon capital of the world. The world’s fastest, tall-masted, clipper ships docked at canneries that lined the Fraser River as tonnes of canned fish were loaded into their holds.

It’s hard to imagine what it looked like then. All that’s left on Cannery Row is the remains of a single one — the Gulf of Georgia — and it’s a national historic site. Few traces remain of the fishermen’s shacks, bars, opium dens and brothels from the early 1900s. Among the only remnants of the era is the Hepworth Building at the corner of Moncton Street and 2nd Avenue. Built in 1913 using red bricks carried as ship ballast, it was used for Dr. William Hepworth’s drugstore and medical practice. It was the only building to survive the 1918 fire.

As recently as the 1960s, Cannery Row still thrived. As a child, my guide Gordon Kibble remembers a whistle blowing three times a day – 8 a.m., 4 p.m. and midnight – to mark the shift change at the canneries. He recalls tired, Japanese women clad in green kerchiefs, aprons and boots walking slowly down Moncton and Chatham Streets at shift’s end.

Even now, despite declining salmon stocks and the last cannery closing in 1996, fishing and Cannery Row sustain Steveston.

The commercial fleet still ties up at the government docks and men and women with calloused hands and weathered faces sell fresh and frozen catch off the boats. They’re a picturesque backdrop for the tourists who crowd gift shops and restaurants and for the condo owners with million-dollar waterfront views.

We start our walk at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, heading west to Garry Point Park and its unsurpassed, 360-degree view of Georgia Strait, shipping traffic, the river delta and the mountains.

Irate residents saved the site from development, winning a court battle in 1981. After that, the City of Richmond bought the land, using it first as a sand storage site and later a park. We pause and pay our respects at the Fishermen’s Memorial with its giant net needle.

“I look at some of these [engraved] names and I remember standing here, waving goodbye and a few days later they were gone forever,” says Kibble, who has worked on fishboats as a deck hand, researcher and photographer.

As we walk back toward the cannery, which residents battled for a decade to preserve, Kibble talks about the early 1900s. “It was wall-to-wall buildings along here. People lived here, mended nets, stored their fishing gear. There was a boardwalk in front and a maze of boardwalks and trails behind.”

We pass Chatham and Moncton streets, a tribute to the New Brunswick birthplace of Manoah Steves. One of the first white settlers, Steves bought 700 acres of land on Lulu Island in 1877.

Before the settlers came, there may have been as many as 2,000 Musqueam living in cedar-planked longhouses at Garry Point and another site about a kilometre upriver. Their numbers swelled as much as tenfold during the fishing season. But by 1914, they were all gone.

The first cannery opened in 1882. By 1905, there were 23 of them and they attracted fishermen like Tomekichi Homma. He arrived at 18, helped establish the Japanese Fishermen’s Association, the Fishermen’s Hospital and the Japanese Language School. After becoming a Canadian in 1896, Homma won voting rights for Japanese-Canadians in the B.C. Supreme Court only to have that decision overturned by the British Privy Council.

When we arrive at the government dock, Kibble pulls a rusted can out of his backpack from one of the long-gone Steveston canneries. The label reads: Capital Brand salmon. One side has a drawing of the Parliament Buildings in Victoria; the other, a salmon.

Then, he pulls out a set of four glass vials that hold varying stages of salmon – from eggs to fry. We peer into the water trying to spot some live fry, but find nothing.

Kibble points out the different boats – seiners, gillnetters and those rigged for crabbing. He points to the Lloyd B. Gore, now the Ku’ulakai. It’s a Mikki class tug used by the U.S. navy during the Second World War to tow damaged ships from the Pacific back for repair. Later, it was used by drug runners in the South Pacific. Across from it is the Western Star, a former mine sweeper.

We stop for lunch at Pajo’s, a floating fish stand whose popularity nearly sank it a few years ago when too many people crowded on to the float. The fish and chips come wrapped in a cone that fits neatly into round holes bored in the plastic tables.

Over lunch, Kibble tells me how Steveston Island a.k.a. Shady Island just across the river began as a sandbar and grew as it was loaded up with material dredged from the shipping channel. It’s now important habitat for salmon and dozens of bird species including bald eagles. It has no human settlers yet, but Kibble worries that may not last.

From Pajo’s we go one dock over to the fish sellers, stopping to look at the bench memorial to Tony Cupadouca, only the second person to sell fish off his boat.

A few minutes later at the Moncton Street post office, we run into Pat Westman. She was Canada’s first female harbour manager and it was Westman who said yes when Andy Kormedas was the first fisherman to ask to sell fish from his boat down at the wharf.

Behind the Moncton Street museum, we pause at another memorial. This one is to Big Red, a rambler who had to be frequently bailed out of the pound for roaming unleashed. A red setter, he was the village’s unofficial mayor. He died in 1989 and at the funeral other setters served as an honour guard.

From there, Kibble takes me to what he calls one of Steveston undiscovered gems. Down one of the alleys off Moncton Street, we peer over the back fence into Kay Sakata’s garden filled with flowers, bushes, trees and vegetables.

A few years ago, the city offered to give her garden heritage status, but the family refused.

“In Japan, Kay Sakata would be considered a national living treasure and she should be one here,” says Kibble. “She shows that even in a commercial area you can still enjoy the beauty, majesty and wondrous enchantment of nature.

“This garden came out of love, life, inspiration and a mind that seeks to strive and not yield, to create the perfect setting for the soul ... This is her masterpiece.”

Sakata, who is in her 90s, has lived in Steveston for years except for the terrible period of internment during the Second World War that ripped the village in two. In 1942, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Canada ordered all citizens of Japanese descent living along the coast to go either to an internment camps or to Japan.

Japanese-Canadians had long been an integral part of this community. Still, the fear was that they might use their special knowledge of the coast against Canada’s security. Once the war ended, some – but not all – returned to Steveston and other communities, including Sakata and her family.

We head back to the river and walk along the boardwalk past the sites of Imperial Cannery, which was the world’s largest cannery. We go past a sign that says a new residential-retail development is coming soon; past the old Phoenix Cannery site; and, past an abandoned launching ramp from the old Kishi Boat Works, the last of the wooden boatbuilders that closed in 1985.

At the Britannia Heritage Shipyard, we pass the Murikami house and the Chinese bunkhouse. Kibble takes me into one of the restored stilt houses that he helped rescue and bring to this site. The Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement lived in the house for many years and Kibble’s connection to Steveston began with the nuns. Even though he isn’t Japanese, he went to the Japanese kindergarten that the sisters started in the late 1800s. Earlier this month, the sisters closed their last convent in British Columbia.

As we head back, Kibble tells me his dream is for a riverside “estuarium” – a combination research lab/aquarium/educational centre.

He tells me about the people who live here: “They’re like driftwood,” he says. “They just float in here and if they fit, they stay.”

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